Marlene (24 page)

I said, “That's impossible.” But Nora assured me it was so, that he and his wife were there.

I sang, and, oddly enough, Burt Bacharach afterward said I had been splendid. That's amazing, for when you overexert yourself, the effect is the very opposite most of the time.

After the performance, I was asked to remain on stage. All Russian theaters have stairs leading up to the stage, and soon I saw a man making his way toward me. It was Paustovsky. I was so overcome I was unable to utter a single word. I could express my admiration for him only by sinking to my knees before him. Just imagine that!

His wife calmed me down and explained, “That was good for him,” for I—a nurse concerned about the health of one of her favorite authors—wanted him to return immediately to the hospital. When I consider the great pains that he had taken to see me!

Paustovsky died shortly after this evening, but I still have his books, his short stories, and this memory. He writes in a romantic, but not mannered style. His portrayals recall something of Hamsun. Yet, above all, he is the best Russian writer I know. I regret that I didn't meet him earlier. I would also have liked very much to have
seen Rainer Maria Rilke, but the opportunity never arose. Perhaps at that time he might not have noticed a then unknown admirer.

Later, as a “star,” it was easier to come in contact with particular people. My name was an “Open, Sesame.” I have played that game only on behalf of others, never for myself. Thank heavens my fame was not utterly worthless.

Perhaps it may be surprising that I don't have more favorite authors than Goethe, Rilke, Hamsun, Hemingway, Remarque, and Paustovsky. I greatly admired Heinrich Boll, but he doesn't carry me away like the others. He writes a sober, splendid German. I love him very much because he has restored to the German language its original beauty, which it had lost through the silly Anglo-American expressions so beloved by Germans.

Naturally, I've read John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Erskine Caldwell with great pleasure. English writers also fascinate me—I'm not speaking here of the classics I had read in my early youth. But no other books have had the same impact on me as those of my “heroes,” so beautiful and rewarding. Books and poems that you can always read over and over again.

Strange to say, I find no great pleasure in modern poetry, though I am interested in “modern” poets. Perhaps I'm too old to understand the allusions and hidden meanings of new works? After Rilke, there is no lyric poetry that rings in my ear, that touches my soul, and remains in my memory. Except, perhaps, for W. H. Auden, the poet whom I love the most, after Rilke.

Toward the end of our lives, we tend to remember the pleasures of youth; only the joys one has felt by reading great writers can match them. I'm not speaking here of Dickens, or Baudelaire, or of Rimbaud, to mention only a few of those who have given me joy I'm speaking of Hemingway, Faulkner, Caldwell, Boll, Auden. And I'm speaking of
all
their books, not only some pieces here and there. I'm not a specialist in what is called “light reading,” but I know John MacDonald, Rex Stout, Ed McBain, and other authors who make us forget our daily cares. We all need that. And I often admire their formulations, their narrative talent. They are uncon
tested masters in their field. How many sleepless nights I've spent with them! I'm grateful to them for this.

My nights are long, with or without sleeping pills. I like Dick Francis best of all. Since I love horses and horse races, he has become a good friend, although I've never met him. I browse in bookstores, looking for his newest books, and when I find one of them, I go peacefully to bed with Dick Francis.

Spy novels, on the other hand, don't interest me. The same goes for science fiction. But, of course, I also read best sellers—Erica Jong, for example, although I don't like descriptions of sexual intercourse. In my opinion, they are bad. You can endlessly express your opinion regarding what and how and why this person did this or that with this or that other person. But that has nothing to do with the real story. The great writers never found it necessary to describe sex scenes. They were refined enough to let us share in their nights of love without talking of “f——” or dwelling on the coming and going of the phallus. I'm strictly against pornographic literature, but it seems to sell. Today, perhaps. But weren't books also sold in earlier times? Those books will certainly not last. Their authors will be forgotten in ten years, and they will have deserved their fate. They make a fortune in a jiffy, and stash it away. Not even in their dreams do they think of working for posterity. Mediocre people. Mediocre writers. After one, or at best, two books, it's all over with them. The fount of inspiration is sealed off—if there ever was one.

We attended to each other like two lovers. Each of us was sensitive to the slightest change of mood in the other, the slightest wish. No quarrels, perfect harmony. No attempt to press the other into the mold of one's own ideas. We walked “on tiptoe,” so to speak. I saw the film
The Scoundrel
in Hollywood. I act with an incredible swiftness once my feelings are involved. I phoned Noel Coward at his country home in England and gave my name. He immediately hung up. The telephone operator dialed the number
again, and I quickly said a few words about his film to him. I quoted a part of the dialogue. Thereupon, he explained the situation. He was afraid of being victimized by a certain kind of joker and had believed that someone, using my name, wanted to play a dirty trick on him. We talked for a long time and were friends from then on. Our relationship repeatedly astonished me because my interests were completely different from his. I was neither brilliant nor especially witty, so I didn't like invitations to soirees. I didn't belong to his milieu. I had other habits, shunned the limelight, and didn't view the world as he did. Despite all that, we were inseparable.

He brought me over to London to sing in the Café de Paris—something I would have never dreamed possible. On the first night, he introduced me with a poem he had written for the occasion. Then, enveloped in a radiant aura of fame, I descended the famous staircase and walked right up to his outstretched hand, after which he handed the microphone over to me. After that, great English stage actors followed his example and wrote introductions to my performances. Every night one of them would introduce me in the nightclub where I was scheduled to sing. For a long time I could hardly understand just what was going on. When Alec Guinness phoned me at the Dorchester Hotel to ask for my approval of the text he was to read that same night, I thought it was a prank of some kind. But Guinness himself came to the hotel, showed me his text and said, “Can you dig up a revolver for me somewhere?” He needed one for a parody on Westerns he was to perform before my concert.

No more seats were available in the auditorium, because of me and my magnificent costume, of course (I didn't sing very well at that time), but also because of all the actors present. The whole performance so pleased me that I accepted the offer to give another one next year. This time, instead of actors, there were actresses attired in tuxedos and evening gowns, and women politicians like Mrs. Bessie Braddock, who appeared before the spectators in a simple costume with a hammer and sickle on the lapels. She scored a big hit in this outfit.

We became friends. Later during a tour through England, she
made it a habit to take me along with her on her visits to hospitals and old-age homes, and then drop me off at the theater.

Noel Coward observed these undertakings with a pleased, triumphant look. Sometime after the Braddock episode when I was getting ready for a television show in London, I suddenly learned on the night before the recording that the words of a famous song I wanted to sing had been found objectionable. Noel Coward rushed to my help. We had submitted Cole Porter's “I Get a Kick out of You” to the producers, and everything seemed to be all right. Or at least so we thought. Not at all—the second stanza reads: “I get no kick from cocaine.” I don't know in what year Cole Porter wrote this song, but I certainly know that all the great stars of show business had sung it just as it was. Cole Porter was no longer there when the TV bosses explained to me that the word “cocaine” was taboo. True to my slogan “Stay out of trouble,” I tried to find a word with the same number of syllables and the same rhyme, but, after all, I'm no poet.

After exhausting my resources, I phoned Switzerland and explained my problem to Noel Coward. He said, “Wait, I'll call you back.” So I waited and informed the TV directors that the old word would be replaced by a new one. Thereupon, they pointed out to me that Cole Porter's heirs would have to approve the change. Such were the many obstacles in the preparation of my first TV appearance, scheduled to be taped in a remarkable, splendid theater, still in the process of construction. Well, great premieres have taken place in the most unbelievable dumps, but artists are optimistic, they are born so they can be saved by unexpected miracles.

Noel Coward phoned me again twenty minutes later: “They say that smoking's insane.” Rhyme and meter squared. As always, no problem for him.

He had often asked me to move into his beautiful house above Montreux, but I could never stay more than a few days. During my visits when I went to see him, I always bought tobacco in the village. His butler and I would roll our own cigarettes, but Noel thought they had an awful taste. One day, he said, “Bet you can't stop smoking.”

“Of course I can,” I answered, and then and there put out my cigarette. He did the same. For me it was easy, because I had no reason to smoke. But it was more difficult for him. I kept my word and never smoked again, a further proof of my stupidity. He continued smoking to the end of his days.

When I was still smoking, I slept the sleep of the just. From the time I stopped—since that conversation with Noel Coward—I could never sleep well again. I returned to Paris. Sleepless nights. I followed all possible and imaginable advice. I lay down in bed with my feet pointing North, South and West—never, however, East. Funny, I was just a bundle of nerves. But I wanted to keep my word at all costs. To my great regret, I finally had to resort to sleeping pills, since I had to work and needed sleep.

I don't believe in the stories circulated by scientists in the cancer research centers, claiming that smoking causes lung cancer. That's nonsense. My very good friend, the great tenor, Richard Tauber, never smoked a cigarette in his life, and died of lung cancer in Guy's Hospital in London. I remember it exactly because I wished to pay for his operation during the war, when all foreign assets, including mine, were blocked. You can die from too much aspirin, too much alcohol, or too many sleeping pills. Any substance can carry you off if you go beyond a certain dose. So why not write on Scotch or Bourbon bottles: “Surgeon General Warns That this Beverage Can Lead to Cirrhosis of the Liver”? The answer is simple: This sentence could mean the loss of millions of dollars. I think the cigarette manufacturers were ill advised when they bowed to the judgment of the universities and agreed to print this ominous phrase on packages of cigarettes.

When you stop smoking, you need a substitute. At the time when I was still smoking, I never drank anything, only at dinner, with friends. That was all. Strange as it may seem, people who quit smoking think they have made a pact with the devil and believe
they will never die.
In reality, they die from other illnesses: intestinal cancer, stomach cancer, cancer of the pancreas. Cancer forever gropes around for further victims. To make cigarettes responsible for all this is a great injustice.

Since I had to muster considerable strength to quit smoking,
I will certainly never start all over again, but that's the only reason. Smoking is not harmful—I would like to enjoy the taste of a cigarette again. Death is unavoidable. Why so much fuss over the way you die? Immoderation, of course, is harmful in all areas. But that's not everything. Noel Coward decided to smoke again, and he was right. His mother was dead, he had no children, and he was responsible only for himself, and therefore had the right to spend his last years as he pleased. He hated his “disability” as he called it, and we continually invented new games so that he forgot he could walk only with the greatest difficulty. One day in New York, we saw the play
Oh, Coward,
and Noel had to climb several steps in front of the audience. As usual, he turned the whole thing into a laughing matter. But the way he laughed broke my heart.

When he died in Jamaica, I was on tour in Chicago. At that time I was appearing in a kind of theater that he had always advised me to avoid. I learned the news by telephone together with Joe Davis—the great master of lighting who had prepared my first appearance at the Café de Paris—and broke into tears.

Suffering is selfish and muddles our thoughts. That's a fact; Noel Cowards sensitive egocentrism, with which I was so familiar, never prevented me from loving him with a certain detachment. He could live without me, and I could live without him. At least, we did just that. Today, after so many years, I still miss him. Nobody here below to “recharge my batteries.” A total void in a bleak world. But this world didn't correspond with his ideas or inclinations. He left it without regrets.

T
HERE ARE PAINTERS WHOSE
pictures instantaneously please me, and others whom I learned to appreciate in my youth. I like the Impressionists most. I idolize Paul Cézanne. He always gives free space to the imagination, in which it can take wing. He creates woods and trees with a light brush stroke, and suddenly you see the whole landscape through a painters eyes. Almost no colors—although he puts on color with his brush.

I would also like to speak of a sculptor: Alberto Giacometti. One of his works is a dog I once saw at the Museum of Modern Art. I fell in love with this dog, although normally I don't like dogs.