OF DEATH AND DIETRICH

MARLENE DIETRICH'S LAST LOVER AND THE LOST MEMOIRS

            Some flowers bloom in the dark, and some lives, even public ones, pass not in limelight but in the twilight at its edge.  And though every story has a beginning, middle and end,  it’s not required, as Jean-Luc Godard observed, that they take place in that order.

            How appropriate, then, that a significant episode in the life of Marlene Dietrich should occur on the opposite of the world from where she was born,  and conclude with an event at which she was not even physically present.

            Off-shore drilling for oil was still exotic in the Australia of 1968, and novel enough to lure twenty-six journalists on an excursion to the nation’s first platform, the Barracouta rig, twenty-three kilometres off the south coast of Victoria. The junket went smoothly until just after noon, when their helicopter, an AgustaWestland Leonardo AW139, returned from making a circuit of the platform for the benefit of TV cameramen.

            At the sound of its approach, the visitors drifted towards the helipad. Clustered along the metal railings, they chatted, preoccupied with the flight back and the promise of lunch.  

As the three-thousand-kilo craft ponderously lowered itself within a metre of the deck, the whirr of its tail rotor became a whine, then a howl, and the rotor started to disintegrate. (An enquiry would find that a servicing technician had re-assembled it without a tiny but crucial washer.) Dropping the final metre, the aircraft landed with a thud that sent a shudder through the platform’s superstructure. A strut crumpled, tilting it onto one wheel. Torque from its engines forced it into a screeching 160 degree pivot across the steel deck.

"I had just taken a pic of it,” said a survivor, “when suddenly it slewed around. For a second I thought it was going to roll on top of us.“

            An instant remained in which some of the watchers might have escaped injury or death. But then a rotor blade struck the deck. Titanium and steel became shrapnel.   “Pieces of metal were flying past like bullets,” continued the witness. “I could hear men screaming.”

            Three would die, two instantly, scythed down by the shards of metal. One was teenage trainee Peter Bourke, on his first assignment, the other 31-year-old Hugh Curnow,  feature writer for the Daily Telegraph and a high-profile member of the Australian press.

            To a few people, a husband, father and friend expired in that storm of flying steel. To the world at large, however, Curnow’s passing meant only one thing - Marlene Dietrich’s last lover was dead. 

            The lion in winter may retain some shreds of majesty The lioness is less fortunate. Most ageing courtesans retire into management or marriage . Those with the talent for neither accept that, when the going gets tough, the tough go on tour.

            Cabaret had been Marlene Dietrich’s introduction to performance,  although the night life of the ‘fifties had little in common with that of the Weimar republic forty years earlier.  Audiences of the ‘twenties, weary of war, wanted farts and fags, whores and clowns. They relished the sad parade of tattooed tits and pimply bums, guffawed at unapologetic rudery, cheered the freak-show casts, roared when Anita Berber leaped onto their table at the end of her routine and squatted to piss in their soup.

            Marlene knew adjustments would be required, not to mention lots of rehearsal, and some advice. The last came from her old friend Noel Coward.

            “Las Vegas, my darling!” he fluted. “They hired me, poor dears, so they’ll positively leap at you. Anything to keep the punters glued to those dreadful poker machines.  I’ll even introduce your debut in person.”

            The Sahara swallowed her agent’s cunningly laid bait. In December 1953 she made her debut in its Congo Room, singing a few songs three times a night for three weeks. Her fee was $30,000.

            Over the next decade the money improved, the tours became more frequent and the locations more remote. Young songwriter Burt Bacharach joined the team as her arranger/ accompanist and, some said, lover, and a costumier recreated some of the gowns Jean Louis designed for her at Columbia. 

Those “few songs” metamorphosed into a ninety-minute show, played for the first half in a clinging jewelled evening gown and a cape edged in white ermine, the second in top hat and tails. Among her numerous special requirements was a personal toilet with a fur-covered seat always available in the wings. Marlene was back, bigger than ever. An Australian entrepreneur even offered enough  money to overcome her horror of flying and embark on the interminable series of flights that delivered her to Sydney and Hugh Curnow and disaster.

Hugh Curnow’s beat was show biz but he didn’t have it all to himself.  If the brash Brisbane boy was the archetypal Australian, sporty, social and straight, Charles Higham,  literary editor and feature writer for Australia’s leading political and arts weekly, The Bulletin,  was his opposite - British, snobbish and gay.  

Poet, journalist and film historian, he was also an unrepentant muckraker, gossip-monger and star-fucker. Tall and athletic, with a guffawing laugh, a toothy grin and a full head of hair, he belied his British home counties background of privilege and public schools by being passionate for the beach, as well as an unabashed admirer of the Australian life-style.

Both were reflected in his leisure pursuits as a player in Sydney’s outlaw sub-culture of homosexuals. He was graphic in describing a typical self-gratifying weekend of sexual excess in those palmy days pre-AIDS.  “With a friend.” he recounted breathlessly, “I staged an event to which we invited the best-looking men we knew. The rule was followed exactly; clothes piled up in my friend’s bedroom, each perfect specimen available to the others, towels on the floor spread out to catch the falling sperm, and no music to attract attention from the neighbors. At midnight there was a circle jerk, each guest, if he had anything left over, spilling onto the chest of a prone naked athlete. It was the night of nights of my life.”

            Cinema history will remember him as the man who alleged – or revealed? – that Errol Flynn was a Nazi sympathiser and perhaps a spy, an assertion that obscured his considerable gifts as a chronicler of films and film stars, with a sharp eye for the oddities of both. His pants-down profiles and unsparing obituaries had the recently deceased turning over in their freshly dug graves. 

He could still taste the blood of his latest celebrity victim, ambushed and eaten just a few months before. Early in 1965, PanAm inaugurated a direct route from Mexico City to Sydney. A passenger on the first flight was actress Merle Oberon, who had retired to Mexico with a wealthy husband. Puzzled by local journalists enquiring how it felt to be home again, she belatedly discovered that the standard biographies listed her birthplace as Tasmania. As she fled back to Mexico, Higham noted her panic, and advertised for anyone who had known Oberon and her family in Australia. Only one person replied, remarking cryptically, “If you really think she was born in Tasmania, we have nothing to talk about.”

            He learned that Oberon was actually born Queenie Thompson in Mumbai, her mother a teenage prostitute from Sri Lanka and her father a Welsh soldier. Once she moved to London and caught the eye of studio head Alexander Korda, who eventually married her, it became prudent to change her name and disguise her roots, since performers of mixed blood were exiled to roles as domestics (“Lawdy, Miz’ Scarlett!”) or temptresses (“Call me…Tondelayo.”) Korda’s publicists selected the most remote corner of the Commonwealth, and said she’d been born there. (Who knew? Perhaps all Tasmanians shared her slanted eyes and magnolia skin.) In the final oddity, Oberon brought her mother to London to live with her, but always passed her off as her maid.  After her death, she had a portrait painted which showed her skin tone several degrees lighter.

            News of Marlene’s imminent arrival sent Higham into overdrive. Rumour suggested that, after decades of refusal, she was ready to publish her memoirs, for which she would need a collaborator. Such a project could be his passport out of this cultural backwater, and an entree to the elite of Beverly Hills and Broadway.

             He set out to snare Dietrich, beginning with her first press conference in Melbourne, an event he gleefully documented in The Bulletin.

            “A foreign waiter steps up to Marlene’s chair, carrying a tray with a flourish. On it    sits a huge glistening ice-cream in the shape of an apple.” 

The hotel’s maitre d’ reminds the press of an antipodean tradition of celebrating great divas  with the creation of a dessert: the Pavlova for Russian dancer Anna Pavlova, the Peach Melba for Melbourne’s own Dame Nellie Melba.

            “The apple,” he continues’, “was the first fruit that the first gentleman tempted the first lady with. We have it here tonight. We have given it the name ‘Madame Marlene.’”

            With a flourish, he presents Dietrich with a parfait dish piled high with ice cream.  Inscrutable, Dietrich places the confection on the floor by her chair, where it melts, untasted, for the rest of the conference.

            At the end of the conference, Higham  introduces himself,  and is rewarded with an invitation to meet her after her show.

“Backstage,” he writes breathlessly (Can one preen in print?)  “she clings to my arm eagerly, like a young girl. ‘They…” (the audience) “… were so quick!’ She is delighted with them…”

            Surely it couldn’t get better than this.  But she surprises him again.  “Next afternoon, I am in my hotel room when the telephone rings. The voice on the other end is unmistakeable. ‘Hello, this is Marlene. I would have called you earlier but people have never stopped calling me. But let us meet privately. Why don’t you come and have supper with me after the show?’ ”

            They find a small, secluded suburban restaurant. A flustered management tries to serve champagne but she brushes it off, preferring the burgundy she’s brought with her. When the restaurant closes, they return to her hotel, where they cosily swap Hollywood gossip until dawn.

            Towards the end, Higham broaches the question of her memoirs. After that, the topic hangs tantalisingly between them. If only it were possible…so much think about...we shall see...

            “We say a temporary goodbye,” he concludes. “She will catch up with me in Sydney... a sign of naiveté and incurable film-fan-ism no doubt but it still seems extraordinary to talk to a legend on the telephone...”

            He sends books of Australian poetry to her hotel. She acknowledges them politely, but shows no inclination to discuss them over another crepuscular tête-à-tête. Most dismaying of all, there is no further talk of the memoirs.

            A few days later, comes the dawn – literally. The Australian Woman’s Weekly publishes a colour photo-spread showing Dietrich on a midnight-to-dawn promenade around Sydney, concluding on Bondi Beach at dawn. Her companion, guide and, implied the accompanying text, close and intimate friend, is Hugh Curnow.

All Sydney soon knew the story, or Curnow’s version of it  After interviewing her, he’d delivered a proof of the article to her hotel with a hand-written note inviting her out for an evening in the Sydney that overseas visitors never saw.

            It began at Doyle’s, an unglamorous shack on the edge of the harbour that, belying its shabby exterior, served the city’s best seafood. They didn’t linger, however, and were not seen again until about 4am, when they visited Harry’s Cafe de Wheels, an all-night food stall in dockside Wooloomooloo. Dietrich, now wearing only a light raincoat with  nothing much underneath, sampled one of Harry’s famous meat pies.  

 

            The final sighting took place on Bondi Beach at dawn. How, asked an awed passer-by, could she manage to look so fresh after what had obviously been a sleepless night?

            "Simple," she said. "I didn't go to bed. I read a book.”

            To hear Curnow’s ribald account to awestruck mates over a lager at the Journalists Club, that boozy hangout in the shadow of News Inc’s tower headquarters., not much reading took place. Between the fish supper and the meat pie, their rapport developed into something more intimate. By the time they parted at dawn, Curnow had joined that elite among which were numbered not only some of the most famous stars of Hollywood, both male and female, but others more illustrious still.  She had  granted him the freedom of the most famous legs in the world;  legs that excited both Hemingway and Hitler. Unlike either of them,  however, he was also given access to what lay between them; a region of her anatomy once grazed, he assured his awed listeners, by a president of the United States!

        

    When Dietrich returned to the United States, Curnow went with her. Publicity photographs showed him and Marlene laughing with Billy Wilder on the set of his latest comedy, The Fortune Cookie – the story, significantly, of a nonentity who fakes injury to win a fat insurance settlement, and the crooked lawyer who helps him: a world and a dramatis personae among whom she was comfortable.  But after that, nothing…

In 1977, The Bulletin updated its readers. “Dietrich’s memoirs, currently the subject of a fight between Simon & Schuster and G.P. Putnam’s Sons, were first put down on paper with the help of former Bulletin staffer Hugh Curnow ... Working in Paris and the United States with Dietrich, Curnow was concentrating on her memoirs of two world wars (working title Tell Me, Oh Tell Me Now.) [but] before his death the book was abandoned and the publisher’s advance returned; exactly why, nobody but Dietrich seems to know.  Presumably she kept Curnow’s manuscript and this provides the backbone of the book she sold last week to Putnam’s for $200,000 – after pulling out of an earlier $150,000 deal with Simon & Schuster.  Meanwhile another former Bulletin man, now writing and lecturing on films in Los Angeles, is working on an unauthorised biography of her which has already provided the gossip columns with a snippet or two...”

            Higham was not one to let a star’s refusal discourage him. He’d been shown the door by bigger names than Dietrich. Having relocated in Los Angeles, he recruited a team of fans and film students to gather material.  His headquarters was a house clinging to a cliff above a wooded wilderness, scene of much location shooting in Hollywood’s golden era. “A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree,” producers told to directors demanding authentic location. “Shoot it in Griffith Park.” Across the park, on the summit of the next hill, was the Griffith Observatory, setting for scores of films, including a key scene in James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause.   

            The house  rigorously excluded anything to do with movies, for which Charles’s companion,  Richard Palafox, a slight, silent Filipino male nurse with something of Gale Sondergaard in his manner, had an intense dislike. Instead, every shelf displayed his collection of miniature porcelain and glass figures of sprites, naiads and forest animals, each one tethered to the shelf - this was earthquake country, after all – with a rubber band.

Higham’s Dietrich biography, rich in the promised scandal, though not a lot of it supported with chapter and verse, appeared in 1978. A copy was among the books found in her apartment after her death.  Marlene liked to annotate her books,  and her comments on this one, scrawled in vivid red felt pen – “Nonsense”, “Wrong! Wrong”, “Where did he get this?”, “Rubbish” – make clear her displeasure.

Of Hugh Curnow’s manuscript and Simon and Schuster’s $200,000 advance, nothing more was heard, although in 1984 a French press published her rambling collection of anecdotes and aphorisms under the title Marlene D.  There was no English-language edition.

            Did Marlene ever mean to write her memoirs? At first, perhaps. But she soon had second thoughts. Her instincts warned her to be cautious about opening her life to a biographer like Higham, who would not have curbed his investigative instincts. (As ever about such matters, she was  correct. Before his book even appeared, he announced with a whoop that he’d found her birth certificate and discovered she’d lied about her age.)

            Better the tractable Curnow, kept on a leash with sexual favours and the occasional glimpse of life in the Hollywood fast lane.  But Curnow was a risk. Better to rely on silence, misdirection, the cultivation of the legend.  A couplet from one of Higham’s poems, The Mezzotint, offered an ironic commentary on her decision to stay silent about her past. It pondered the duplicity of Madeleine Smith, a respectable Scottish heiress who escaped conviction in 1857 for the murder of  her lover. It ended  “Deep in her heart she kept her little myth/An upright miracle. A saint. A Smith.”