Falling in Love Again

She lived so long—90 years!—and accomplished so much!

Marlene Dietrich was a complex amalgam of a great number of women. Each with a unique view, stance, personality. Each composed of an incomparable face and figure, and all, thank fortune and nature, in possession of Those Legs. She not only possessed but knew what to do with them.

When toward the end of her career she undertook the performance of her spectacular solo show, she played a delicious trick one night that neither I nor any other man or woman in the audience will ever forget. Appearing in her figure-caressing, floor-length, beaded-and-sequined Jean Louis gown, she slowly and methodically revealed, inch by inch, one of those glorious gams we had all come to see. Noel Coward doubted that Helen of Troy could have been "one-quarter as good as our legendary, lovely Marlene."

Alexander Liberman, her friend of more than 40 years, took pictures of her in comfortable, intimate surroundings that do nothing to detract from the legend. Rather, they add a warmth and naturalness that make her charmingly human in Liberman's about-to-be-published Marlene: An Intimate Photographic Memoir (Random House). Here is the Marlene I remember and miss: in her kitchen, at the beach, in a Checker cab, smoke from an ever present cigarette wreathing her ravishing features.

She was the most experienced and seductive flirt of her time, turning that heady activity into an art form. A friend who knew her better than I told me that on the night he met her at a dinner party she flattered him by constantly meeting his eyes across the candlelit table. Before dessert she had arranged that he change places with her dinner companion. As they sipped their coffee, she said, "I would like very much to see you again." The phrase, whispered in her husky monotone, held him in her thrall. He could say nothing except, "Why?"

"Because," she purred, "you remind me of my first great love."

He told his wife the story as they drove home through Bel-Air. "I'm still shaking," he said.

His wife later told me she always regretted what she said: "Do you think she's ever said that to anyone before?"

But what if she had? Marlene was someone to dream about.

The Dietrich story may be over. The Dietrich stories are not. Around the world there are men and women who knew her, worked with her, envied her, and loved her. The books still to be written about film in the 20th century will surely include much more than passing references to Marie Magdalene, who invented and became. . .Marlene.

GARSON KANIN