Free Anyone Who Had a Heart by Burt Bacharach

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.
    When we worked together in Madrid, Francisco Franco was in the audience. Marlene was offstage trying to get out of her gown so she could change into her white tie and tails as quickly as possible and I was conducting “The Blue Angel”