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The Age
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘A terrible tragedy': The night in Sydney that changed Marlene Dietrich's life
This story is part of the June 7 edition of Good Weekend. See all 14 stories. When showbiz impresario Harley Medcalf warns me his North Sydney office is 'a bit of a museum', it soon becomes clear he is only half-joking. On the 16th floor of a nondescript office tower on Arthur Street, the space is filled to the rafters with the sort of celebrity detritus that comes from a long career working with some of the world's most famous names. Posters of his current clients, including a young magician named Jackson Aces and former cricketer Steve Waugh, adorn the walls, along with others he's 'looked after' in a long and storied career. Gazing down on us are Frank Sinatra, Barry Humphries, Suzi Quatro, Billy Connolly, Meatloaf, Elton John and 1970s Greek pop star Demis Roussos, with whom Medcalf became particularly close when he negotiated cash payments for the singer. 'I'm a bit of a hoarder, I guess … I also have two shipping containers full of stuff,' the 74-year-old says as we survey the money-can't-buy 'merch', including countless tour programs. When we get to one item, Medcalf stops talking and draws a long, wistful breath. 'There she is,' he declares with a smile, pulling down a black and white image taken at Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport in 1975 featuring him escorting arguably the most famous, enigmatic and enduring star of them all, Marlene Dietrich. 'She was a pretty big deal,' he says. There's another shot of Dietrich in a silver frame on his desk. 'I knew I had to be very professional, she did not suffer fools gladly, there was an air of formality around her which I liked … she had real star power.' Well, that was until the evening of September 29, 1975 and the tumultuous, tragic and morbidly comical events which unfolded around Dietrich in Sydney and robbed the world of one of its greatest stars. Medcalf now looks back at that fateful Monday night as 'probably the most extraordinary evening of my career'. It will soon be a half-century since Dietrich, sparkling in sequins and swaddled in her famous three-metre-long, spotlessly white swansdown coat, took a tumble on stage at the long-gone Her Majesty's Theatre in Sydney midway through her Australian tour. That fall would ultimately end one of the greatest showbiz careers of the 20th century and result in Dietrich living the next 17 years of her life in squalor, a tragic recluse in Paris. It would also see one of Australia's richest men, Kerry Packer, abandon his ambitions to become a major showbiz player, while the nuns, doctors and nurses at St Vincent's Hospital in Darlinghurst, along with the local press, would bear witness to one of the more bizarre celebrity encounters to take place on these Antipodean shores. It culminated in the inglorious, haphazard departure of Dietrich at Sydney Airport, where she waited for her flight atop a stretcher, in agony and under the cover of a blanket to shield her from the press. It was a scene far removed from the bright lights of Hollywood, the neon of Las Vegas or the footlights of the West End theatres where she had once reigned supreme. There is no hint of what was to befall Dietrich as I study Medcalf's prized photo closely. She is wearing huge black sunglasses, trademark lipstick and a denim boiler suit. Her honey-coloured locks are swept up into a jaunty, oversized 'newsboy' cap ballooning atop her head. Her bird-like frame, taut complexion and swinging fashion sense belie that of an ageing cabaret singer. 'We shared a droll sense of humour, but with Marlene there were clear boundaries,' Medcalf recalls. 'She would hand-write me memos each day, and I'd type up her daily schedule each night and slip it under her hotel door. I had to tape down the curtains of her rooms so no light would get in, and some nights it was me who laced up her undergarments, a sort of plastic corset thing that kept it all in shape … so yeah, we had a pretty close working relationship.' Despite some unkind conjecture about her age in the local press at the time, Dietrich was 74, the same as Medcalf is today. She was photographed arriving for her third tour of Australia. Still a global superstar, Dietrich struck a deal – underwritten by Packer – to be paid upfront before the first curtain had been raised. Medcalf confirms Dietrich was no pushover. Already famous for rebelling against conservative gender stereotypes, she flagrantly pushed the boundaries of fluid sexuality decades before successors like Madonna had even been born, let alone worn a conical bra. Dietrich was the woman playwright Noël Coward called a 'legend', dancer and actor Robert Helpmann described as 'magic' and poet and writer Jean Cocteau billed as a living 'wonder'. She survived two world wars and famously spurned one of her biggest fans, Adolf Hitler, and his Third Reich, rubbing salt into the Führer's wounds by becoming a wartime poster girl for her adopted America after leaving her beloved German homeland. Packer never had a chance. 'I soon realised there were two kinds of days with Marlene. There were the champagne days… And then there were her 'whiskey days'.' Harley Medcalf Although Medcalf may have been playing it cool by Dietrich's side in this photo from 1975, he was undeniably chaperoning an icon. 'But I soon realised there were two kinds of days with Marlene,' he explains. 'There were the champagne days, when she could go through bottles of the stuff and still remain positive, effervescent and incredibly charming, her wit sparkling, absolutely beguiling everyone who met her. And then there were her 'whiskey days'. They were much darker … she would be angry and broody, they were very difficult days for everyone … she became mean.' Medcalf was working as operations manager for Encore Theatrical Services, an emerging tour company set up in Sydney by Packer, English-born international showbiz figure Danny O'Donovan and Sydney-based promoter Cyril Smith. From a small office in Packer's Park Street Australian Consolidated Press offices, Encore had quickly become a force in the Australian touring business, notching up early successes with Roberta Flack and Gladys Knight and the Pips. By the time Dietrich was in Australia, Encore had notched up more than $1 million in box office sales in less than two years. Medcalf's job was to get Dietrich on stage – and on time. 'On champagne days,' he says, 'she would walk with me arm in arm through the wings to her position, where she would come out holding on to the curtain as the overture started and the lights came on … very elegant and very Dietrich. As soon as the spotlight hit her, the icon we all remembered was there in full flight, blazing in sparkles … incandescent.' September 29, 1975, was not one of Dietrich's champagne days. According to her daughter Maria Riva's 1992 biography, Marlene Dietrich: The Life, her mother was drunk in her dressing room long before the show was due to start. Dietrich's dresser and a girlfriend of one of the musicians had 'tried desperately to sober her up in the dressing room with black coffee'. Adds Medcalf: 'It was definitely a whiskey day. She'd been drinking heavily. I knew something was wrong when she was not responding to the stage calls … 15 minutes, five minutes. When I finally got her out of the dressing room she did not want to be touched. We got to the side of the stage … she was really unsteady on her feet. 'I was trying to hook arms with her, but she was pushing me away. She reached out and grabbed the curtain. She wouldn't let me hold her and just held the curtain for support … but it started going up and took her with it. She must have gone up two feet before she hit the deck. Some of the orchestra saw it, too, and stopped playing. 'The audience could see what was going on and I got them to quickly drop the curtain, which came down on top of her, her legs on one side and her head the other. I picked her up and got her to the dressing room as quickly as I could. 'She flatly refused to leave the theatre in an ambulance. I still have no idea how she was coping with the pain, given what we later discovered. She demanded to leave the theatre in her Rolls-Royce. It must have been agony for her, but she wanted to wave to her fans, to maintain an appearance that everything was all right. That's real toughness and fortitude.' From the age of 60, Dietrich had been touring the globe, hauling her collection of sequinned, hand-stitched 'nude' dresses and the huge swansdown coat with her, for which Dietrich wryly claimed 2000 swans had 'willingly' given 'the down off their breasts'. 'She knew how to give the press what they wanted,' Medcalf laughs. For nearly 15 years Dietrich maintained a hectic touring schedule, gracing stages across South America, Canada, Spain, Great Britain, the US, Israel, France, Portugal, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Sweden, Holland, Russia, Belgium, Denmark, South Africa, Israel, Japan and, finally, Australia. Riva, her only child, harboured growing concerns for her mother's physical health and her constant need for public adulation, along with an increasingly self-destructive lifestyle propped up by booze and pills. 'Her drinking had accelerated, not only before and after a performance, but during it as well,' she writes of when Dietrich started touring in 1960. 'I knew the constant ache in her legs and back had become the perfect excuse to increase the intake of narcotics and alcohol she had been taking for years.' There had been other major falls and fractures during the years touring, though most had been kept quiet. Dietrich fell head first into an orchestra pit during her triumphal return to Germany in 1960, breaking her collarbone. Later that year an X-ray revealed massive occlusions of the lower aorta, effectively starving her legs of their normal blood supply. 'For the next 13 years my mother played her own deadly version of Russian roulette with her body's circulatory system and nearly got away with it,' Riva reveals. By all accounts, Dietrich's Australian fans and promoters were oblivious to just how frail she had become. Medcalf said he and his colleagues at Encore were unaware that on January 26, 1974, Dietrich, under her husband's name Mrs Rudolf Sieber, had secretly checked in to the Methodist Medical Centre in Houston and underwent surgery to 'save' her legs, consisting of an aorto right femoral, left iliac bypass, and a bilateral lumbar sympathectomy. Six weeks later she was back on stage, touring the US. In August 1975, as Dietrich prepared for her tour of Australia, her husband suffered a massive stroke that left him in a wheelchair and in need of around-the-clock care. Dietrich had been living independently for most of their open marriage and insisted she still go on tour. Her daughter's biography also reveals, somewhat surreptitiously, that the singer had conducted a long-term extramarital affair with an unnamed married Australian journalist several years earlier. However, there appears to be no further documentation of the relationship and Medcalf is equally unaware when asked about the claims. The details of her Australian paramour seem destined to remain in the grave with Dietrich. Regardless, it was not long after Medcalf collected Dietrich from Tullamarine that warning bells began ringing back in New York. Riva writes: 'Rumours of trouble began to filter back to me. The Australian tour was going badly. I received a call from one of the irate producers: Miss Dietrich was complaining constantly about the sound, the lights, the orchestra, the audiences, the management. She was abusive, she was drunk, both on and off the stage. Her concerts were not sold out, the management was considering cancelling the rest of the tour … we negotiated a compromise … to do our very best to persuade Miss Dietrich to consider terminating the tour, attempt to straighten out some of the more unpleasant disagreements if they, in turn, agreed to pay her contractual salary without any deductions. Fortunately, by now all they wanted was to get rid of her, cut their losses.' Dietrich refused to quit. Riva writes of her mother's abuse of powerful (now banned) drugs and booze: 'Filled with her usual [narcotic painkiller] Darvon, [stimulant-sedative] Dexamyl and Scotch, Dietrich opened in Sydney on the 24th of September, 1975.' On that night, Stuart Greene, then 21, was working as an usher at Her Majesty's Theatre. An ardent fan of Dietrich's, he tells Good Weekend she was much more gracious and coherent than she was given credit for. 'We all got to meet her in person when she arrived,' he says. 'She was very gracious. It was my job to give her the flowers on stage at the end of the performance; goodness, that was such a thrill for me, looking back. There had been some pretty horrible things written about her, but when she was giving it her best, she really was magnificent.' 'I distinctly remember everyone in that audience making a collective gasp as she fell.' Vicki Jones Indeed, Greene managed to get closer to Dietrich – or at least to her costumes – than even her most admiring fans. 'I remember sneaking into her dressing room before a show and trying on the swansdown coat.' Greene also remembers theatre workers meticulously cleaning the stage floor at Her Majesty's Theatre. 'She demanded it be spotless because she had that huge train of feathers dragging around behind her … they were pure white!' Not everyone in Australia was quite as enamoured. A week before she came to Sydney, Phillip Adams, after comparing her to an embalmed Egyptian mummy, wrote in The Age of her Melbourne show: 'Where other performers go through their paces, she goes through her inches. A gesture here, a raised eyebrow there. Nonetheless, the illusion of life is almost convincing.' But it was following her first Sydney show that the press fully unloaded. The Daily Telegraph 's Mike Gibson wrote: 'A little old lady, bravely trying to play the part of a former movie queen called Marlene Dietrich, is tottering around the stage of Her Majesty's Theatre. When I say bravely I mean it. Without a doubt her show is the bravest, saddest, most bittersweet concert I have ever seen. When it is over the applause from her fans is tremendous … Hanging onto the red curtains for support, she takes bow after bow. She is still bowing, and waving, still breathing it all in as we leave.' Five days later, Dietrich was lying under that same curtain in a crumpled, sparkling, fluffy heap. Among those in the audience, sitting with a group of managers from the Packer camp, was former head of Channel Nine publicity Vicki Jones, who vividly remembers the audience's reaction watching Dietrich fall. 'I do distinctly remember everyone in that audience making a collective gasp as she fell, it was like the entire theatre had reacted exactly on cue,' Jones says. 'It really was quite something to witness, and upon reflection a terrible tragedy for her … and the public.' Riva writes that the 'shock' of falling had sobered her mother sufficiently to realise something was wrong with her left leg, which would not support her. Dietrich had to be spirited out of the theatre as fast as possible. 'But she absolutely refused to have her fans, waiting for her at the stage door, see her close up in the stage dress and insisted on changing first. As she had to be held upright in order to remove the dress without tearing it, my mother locked her arms around the neck of the distraught producer, and just hung there, while two women peeled off her costume and dressed her into her Chanel suit.' Dressed in her designer bouclé, Dietrich returned to her Sydney hotel – the Boulevard on William Street, on the edge of Kings Cross – while her daughter alerted her doctors in New York, who were soon in contact with doctors at St Vincent's Hospital. Orthopaedic surgeon Brett Courtenay had only just started working at St Vincent's. He was mentored by the same surgeon who treated Dietrich, the late head of orthopaedics and keen sailor Dr John Roarty. 'John had a great sense of humour and would tell us stories about treating Marlene … she even gave him a signed photo of herself as a thank you,' Courtenay recalls. An international convention of orthopaedic surgeons was taking place in Sydney the same week Dietrich was performing. Within the hour, Roarty, resplendent in his tuxedo, having come straight from a gala evening, attended her suite. She refused to be taken to hospital, though Roarty suspected her femur was fractured. 'All that night my mother lay in her bed, hardly daring to breathe,' Riva writes. Early the next morning Dietrich finally allowed herself to be smuggled out of the hotel into St Vincent's Hospital, where she was made slightly more comfortable with the aid of sheepskins placed under her brittle, delicate frame, the same Australian sheepskins she would lie on until her death in Paris 17 years later. X-rays confirmed the doctor's suspicions. She had a broken femur of the left leg. Dietrich refused to remain in Australia. Roarty convinced her she needed to be placed in a protective body cast if she insisted on flying back to the US, and she was photographed in it being hauled out of St Vincent's into an ambulance when she was discharged. Dietrich would remain horizontal for almost all her remaining days. Dietrich's more glamorous image now hangs on the wall of St Vincent's. The caption claims she was a 'difficult' patient but that her 'departure was that of a great star'. (The hospital's archivists were unable to find any more details for Good Weekend.) Loading Riva and Dietrich's medical team made arrangements for a Pan Am jet to remove four seats so that Dietrich could be accommodated horizontally for the long flight back to Los Angeles. The cancelled shows left a huge hole in Encore's coffers. Co-founder Cyril Smith told The Sydney Morning Herald at the time it would account for a $100,000 hit (equivalent to $890,000 today). Having already agreed to pay Dietrich, an unimpressed Kerry Packer pulled the pin on the touring business. Encore was kaput. And Medcalf? 'I discovered I didn't have a job when I pulled into the Australian Consolidated Press car park a few days later,' he says, chuckling. 'Not only had Marlene cost me my job, the security guard told me I no longer had a parking spot, either.'
Sydney Morning Herald
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘A terrible tragedy': The night in Sydney that changed Marlene Dietrich's life
This story is part of the June 7 edition of Good Weekend. See all 14 stories. When showbiz impresario Harley Medcalf warns me his North Sydney office is 'a bit of a museum', it soon becomes clear he is only half-joking. On the 16th floor of a nondescript office tower on Arthur Street, the space is filled to the rafters with the sort of celebrity detritus that comes from a long career working with some of the world's most famous names. Posters of his current clients, including a young magician named Jackson Aces and former cricketer Steve Waugh, adorn the walls, along with others he's 'looked after' in a long and storied career. Gazing down on us are Frank Sinatra, Barry Humphries, Suzi Quatro, Billy Connolly, Meatloaf, Elton John and 1970s Greek pop star Demis Roussos, with whom Medcalf became particularly close when he negotiated cash payments for the singer. 'I'm a bit of a hoarder, I guess … I also have two shipping containers full of stuff,' the 74-year-old says as we survey the money-can't-buy 'merch', including countless tour programs. When we get to one item, Medcalf stops talking and draws a long, wistful breath. 'There she is,' he declares with a smile, pulling down a black and white image taken at Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport in 1975 featuring him escorting arguably the most famous, enigmatic and enduring star of them all, Marlene Dietrich. 'She was a pretty big deal,' he says. There's another shot of Dietrich in a silver frame on his desk. 'I knew I had to be very professional, she did not suffer fools gladly, there was an air of formality around her which I liked … she had real star power.' Well, that was until the evening of September 29, 1975 and the tumultuous, tragic and morbidly comical events which unfolded around Dietrich in Sydney and robbed the world of one of its greatest stars. Medcalf now looks back at that fateful Monday night as 'probably the most extraordinary evening of my career'. It will soon be a half-century since Dietrich, sparkling in sequins and swaddled in her famous three-metre-long, spotlessly white swansdown coat, took a tumble on stage at the long-gone Her Majesty's Theatre in Sydney midway through her Australian tour. That fall would ultimately end one of the greatest showbiz careers of the 20th century and result in Dietrich living the next 17 years of her life in squalor, a tragic recluse in Paris. It would also see one of Australia's richest men, Kerry Packer, abandon his ambitions to become a major showbiz player, while the nuns, doctors and nurses at St Vincent's Hospital in Darlinghurst, along with the local press, would bear witness to one of the more bizarre celebrity encounters to take place on these Antipodean shores. It culminated in the inglorious, haphazard departure of Dietrich at Sydney Airport, where she waited for her flight atop a stretcher, in agony and under the cover of a blanket to shield her from the press. It was a scene far removed from the bright lights of Hollywood, the neon of Las Vegas or the footlights of the West End theatres where she had once reigned supreme. There is no hint of what was to befall Dietrich as I study Medcalf's prized photo closely. She is wearing huge black sunglasses, trademark lipstick and a denim boiler suit. Her honey-coloured locks are swept up into a jaunty, oversized 'newsboy' cap ballooning atop her head. Her bird-like frame, taut complexion and swinging fashion sense belie that of an ageing cabaret singer. 'We shared a droll sense of humour, but with Marlene there were clear boundaries,' Medcalf recalls. 'She would hand-write me memos each day, and I'd type up her daily schedule each night and slip it under her hotel door. I had to tape down the curtains of her rooms so no light would get in, and some nights it was me who laced up her undergarments, a sort of plastic corset thing that kept it all in shape … so yeah, we had a pretty close working relationship.' Despite some unkind conjecture about her age in the local press at the time, Dietrich was 74, the same as Medcalf is today. She was photographed arriving for her third tour of Australia. Still a global superstar, Dietrich struck a deal – underwritten by Packer – to be paid upfront before the first curtain had been raised. Medcalf confirms Dietrich was no pushover. Already famous for rebelling against conservative gender stereotypes, she flagrantly pushed the boundaries of fluid sexuality decades before successors like Madonna had even been born, let alone worn a conical bra. Dietrich was the woman playwright Noël Coward called a 'legend', dancer and actor Robert Helpmann described as 'magic' and poet and writer Jean Cocteau billed as a living 'wonder'. She survived two world wars and famously spurned one of her biggest fans, Adolf Hitler, and his Third Reich, rubbing salt into the Führer's wounds by becoming a wartime poster girl for her adopted America after leaving her beloved German homeland. Packer never had a chance. 'I soon realised there were two kinds of days with Marlene. There were the champagne days… And then there were her 'whiskey days'.' Harley Medcalf Although Medcalf may have been playing it cool by Dietrich's side in this photo from 1975, he was undeniably chaperoning an icon. 'But I soon realised there were two kinds of days with Marlene,' he explains. 'There were the champagne days, when she could go through bottles of the stuff and still remain positive, effervescent and incredibly charming, her wit sparkling, absolutely beguiling everyone who met her. And then there were her 'whiskey days'. They were much darker … she would be angry and broody, they were very difficult days for everyone … she became mean.' Medcalf was working as operations manager for Encore Theatrical Services, an emerging tour company set up in Sydney by Packer, English-born international showbiz figure Danny O'Donovan and Sydney-based promoter Cyril Smith. From a small office in Packer's Park Street Australian Consolidated Press offices, Encore had quickly become a force in the Australian touring business, notching up early successes with Roberta Flack and Gladys Knight and the Pips. By the time Dietrich was in Australia, Encore had notched up more than $1 million in box office sales in less than two years. Medcalf's job was to get Dietrich on stage – and on time. 'On champagne days,' he says, 'she would walk with me arm in arm through the wings to her position, where she would come out holding on to the curtain as the overture started and the lights came on … very elegant and very Dietrich. As soon as the spotlight hit her, the icon we all remembered was there in full flight, blazing in sparkles … incandescent.' September 29, 1975, was not one of Dietrich's champagne days. According to her daughter Maria Riva's 1992 biography, Marlene Dietrich: The Life, her mother was drunk in her dressing room long before the show was due to start. Dietrich's dresser and a girlfriend of one of the musicians had 'tried desperately to sober her up in the dressing room with black coffee'. Adds Medcalf: 'It was definitely a whiskey day. She'd been drinking heavily. I knew something was wrong when she was not responding to the stage calls … 15 minutes, five minutes. When I finally got her out of the dressing room she did not want to be touched. We got to the side of the stage … she was really unsteady on her feet. 'I was trying to hook arms with her, but she was pushing me away. She reached out and grabbed the curtain. She wouldn't let me hold her and just held the curtain for support … but it started going up and took her with it. She must have gone up two feet before she hit the deck. Some of the orchestra saw it, too, and stopped playing. 'The audience could see what was going on and I got them to quickly drop the curtain, which came down on top of her, her legs on one side and her head the other. I picked her up and got her to the dressing room as quickly as I could. 'She flatly refused to leave the theatre in an ambulance. I still have no idea how she was coping with the pain, given what we later discovered. She demanded to leave the theatre in her Rolls-Royce. It must have been agony for her, but she wanted to wave to her fans, to maintain an appearance that everything was all right. That's real toughness and fortitude.' From the age of 60, Dietrich had been touring the globe, hauling her collection of sequinned, hand-stitched 'nude' dresses and the huge swansdown coat with her, for which Dietrich wryly claimed 2000 swans had 'willingly' given 'the down off their breasts'. 'She knew how to give the press what they wanted,' Medcalf laughs. For nearly 15 years Dietrich maintained a hectic touring schedule, gracing stages across South America, Canada, Spain, Great Britain, the US, Israel, France, Portugal, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Sweden, Holland, Russia, Belgium, Denmark, South Africa, Israel, Japan and, finally, Australia. Riva, her only child, harboured growing concerns for her mother's physical health and her constant need for public adulation, along with an increasingly self-destructive lifestyle propped up by booze and pills. 'Her drinking had accelerated, not only before and after a performance, but during it as well,' she writes of when Dietrich started touring in 1960. 'I knew the constant ache in her legs and back had become the perfect excuse to increase the intake of narcotics and alcohol she had been taking for years.' There had been other major falls and fractures during the years touring, though most had been kept quiet. Dietrich fell head first into an orchestra pit during her triumphal return to Germany in 1960, breaking her collarbone. Later that year an X-ray revealed massive occlusions of the lower aorta, effectively starving her legs of their normal blood supply. 'For the next 13 years my mother played her own deadly version of Russian roulette with her body's circulatory system and nearly got away with it,' Riva reveals. By all accounts, Dietrich's Australian fans and promoters were oblivious to just how frail she had become. Medcalf said he and his colleagues at Encore were unaware that on January 26, 1974, Dietrich, under her husband's name Mrs Rudolf Sieber, had secretly checked in to the Methodist Medical Centre in Houston and underwent surgery to 'save' her legs, consisting of an aorto right femoral, left iliac bypass, and a bilateral lumbar sympathectomy. Six weeks later she was back on stage, touring the US. In August 1975, as Dietrich prepared for her tour of Australia, her husband suffered a massive stroke that left him in a wheelchair and in need of around-the-clock care. Dietrich had been living independently for most of their open marriage and insisted she still go on tour. Her daughter's biography also reveals, somewhat surreptitiously, that the singer had conducted a long-term extramarital affair with an unnamed married Australian journalist several years earlier. However, there appears to be no further documentation of the relationship and Medcalf is equally unaware when asked about the claims. The details of her Australian paramour seem destined to remain in the grave with Dietrich. Regardless, it was not long after Medcalf collected Dietrich from Tullamarine that warning bells began ringing back in New York. Riva writes: 'Rumours of trouble began to filter back to me. The Australian tour was going badly. I received a call from one of the irate producers: Miss Dietrich was complaining constantly about the sound, the lights, the orchestra, the audiences, the management. She was abusive, she was drunk, both on and off the stage. Her concerts were not sold out, the management was considering cancelling the rest of the tour … we negotiated a compromise … to do our very best to persuade Miss Dietrich to consider terminating the tour, attempt to straighten out some of the more unpleasant disagreements if they, in turn, agreed to pay her contractual salary without any deductions. Fortunately, by now all they wanted was to get rid of her, cut their losses.' Dietrich refused to quit. Riva writes of her mother's abuse of powerful (now banned) drugs and booze: 'Filled with her usual [narcotic painkiller] Darvon, [stimulant-sedative] Dexamyl and Scotch, Dietrich opened in Sydney on the 24th of September, 1975.' On that night, Stuart Greene, then 21, was working as an usher at Her Majesty's Theatre. An ardent fan of Dietrich's, he tells Good Weekend she was much more gracious and coherent than she was given credit for. 'We all got to meet her in person when she arrived,' he says. 'She was very gracious. It was my job to give her the flowers on stage at the end of the performance; goodness, that was such a thrill for me, looking back. There had been some pretty horrible things written about her, but when she was giving it her best, she really was magnificent.' 'I distinctly remember everyone in that audience making a collective gasp as she fell.' Vicki Jones Indeed, Greene managed to get closer to Dietrich – or at least to her costumes – than even her most admiring fans. 'I remember sneaking into her dressing room before a show and trying on the swansdown coat.' Greene also remembers theatre workers meticulously cleaning the stage floor at Her Majesty's Theatre. 'She demanded it be spotless because she had that huge train of feathers dragging around behind her … they were pure white!' Not everyone in Australia was quite as enamoured. A week before she came to Sydney, Phillip Adams, after comparing her to an embalmed Egyptian mummy, wrote in The Age of her Melbourne show: 'Where other performers go through their paces, she goes through her inches. A gesture here, a raised eyebrow there. Nonetheless, the illusion of life is almost convincing.' But it was following her first Sydney show that the press fully unloaded. The Daily Telegraph 's Mike Gibson wrote: 'A little old lady, bravely trying to play the part of a former movie queen called Marlene Dietrich, is tottering around the stage of Her Majesty's Theatre. When I say bravely I mean it. Without a doubt her show is the bravest, saddest, most bittersweet concert I have ever seen. When it is over the applause from her fans is tremendous … Hanging onto the red curtains for support, she takes bow after bow. She is still bowing, and waving, still breathing it all in as we leave.' Five days later, Dietrich was lying under that same curtain in a crumpled, sparkling, fluffy heap. Among those in the audience, sitting with a group of managers from the Packer camp, was former head of Channel Nine publicity Vicki Jones, who vividly remembers the audience's reaction watching Dietrich fall. 'I do distinctly remember everyone in that audience making a collective gasp as she fell, it was like the entire theatre had reacted exactly on cue,' Jones says. 'It really was quite something to witness, and upon reflection a terrible tragedy for her … and the public.' Riva writes that the 'shock' of falling had sobered her mother sufficiently to realise something was wrong with her left leg, which would not support her. Dietrich had to be spirited out of the theatre as fast as possible. 'But she absolutely refused to have her fans, waiting for her at the stage door, see her close up in the stage dress and insisted on changing first. As she had to be held upright in order to remove the dress without tearing it, my mother locked her arms around the neck of the distraught producer, and just hung there, while two women peeled off her costume and dressed her into her Chanel suit.' Dressed in her designer bouclé, Dietrich returned to her Sydney hotel – the Boulevard on William Street, on the edge of Kings Cross – while her daughter alerted her doctors in New York, who were soon in contact with doctors at St Vincent's Hospital. Orthopaedic surgeon Brett Courtenay had only just started working at St Vincent's. He was mentored by the same surgeon who treated Dietrich, the late head of orthopaedics and keen sailor Dr John Roarty. 'John had a great sense of humour and would tell us stories about treating Marlene … she even gave him a signed photo of herself as a thank you,' Courtenay recalls. An international convention of orthopaedic surgeons was taking place in Sydney the same week Dietrich was performing. Within the hour, Roarty, resplendent in his tuxedo, having come straight from a gala evening, attended her suite. She refused to be taken to hospital, though Roarty suspected her femur was fractured. 'All that night my mother lay in her bed, hardly daring to breathe,' Riva writes. Early the next morning Dietrich finally allowed herself to be smuggled out of the hotel into St Vincent's Hospital, where she was made slightly more comfortable with the aid of sheepskins placed under her brittle, delicate frame, the same Australian sheepskins she would lie on until her death in Paris 17 years later. X-rays confirmed the doctor's suspicions. She had a broken femur of the left leg. Dietrich refused to remain in Australia. Roarty convinced her she needed to be placed in a protective body cast if she insisted on flying back to the US, and she was photographed in it being hauled out of St Vincent's into an ambulance when she was discharged. Dietrich would remain horizontal for almost all her remaining days. Dietrich's more glamorous image now hangs on the wall of St Vincent's. The caption claims she was a 'difficult' patient but that her 'departure was that of a great star'. (The hospital's archivists were unable to find any more details for Good Weekend.) Loading Riva and Dietrich's medical team made arrangements for a Pan Am jet to remove four seats so that Dietrich could be accommodated horizontally for the long flight back to Los Angeles. The cancelled shows left a huge hole in Encore's coffers. Co-founder Cyril Smith told The Sydney Morning Herald at the time it would account for a $100,000 hit (equivalent to $890,000 today). Having already agreed to pay Dietrich, an unimpressed Kerry Packer pulled the pin on the touring business. Encore was kaput. And Medcalf? 'I discovered I didn't have a job when I pulled into the Australian Consolidated Press car park a few days later,' he says, chuckling. 'Not only had Marlene cost me my job, the security guard told me I no longer had a parking spot, either.'
USA Today
10-05-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Clemson basketball earns a high grade in ESPN's report cards for the 2024-25 season
Clemson basketball earns a high grade in ESPN's report cards for the 2024-25 season ESPN's Myron Medcalf just wrapped up his final evaluation of the Clemson men's basketball season – and the verdict for the Tigers is a resounding A. In his ACC report card for 2024-25, Medcalf acknowledged that Clemson lost two major contributors from their Elite Eight run in 2023-24: PJ Hall, an all-ACC first team selection now with the Denver Nuggets, and seasoned guard Joe Girard III. But despite those departures, head coach Brad Brownell's squad regrouped like few teams can. 'The Tigers lost two key contributors… But Brad Brownell regrouped from the turnover as well as any coach in America could. Chase Hunter and Ian Schieffelin emerged as elite players in the ACC. And Jaeden Zackery and Viktor Lakhin, a pair of transfers, emerged as standouts for a Tigers squad that won 27 games, gave Duke its only ACC loss of the year and earned a 5-seed in the NCAA tournament,' Medcalf wrote. Clemson's 27 wins this season mark a school record, including victories over AP Top 5 opponents Kentucky and Duke. The Tigers also achieved an 18-2 mark in ACC play – the most conference wins in school history, with 15 of those wins coming by double digits, ranking third in ACC history. Notably, the Tigers went 9-1 on the road, setting a new standard with four more wins away than ever before. Medcalf handed out similar A grades to Duke, Georgia Tech, Louisville, SMU, and Stanford. At the other end of the spectrum, Miami was given an F after ending 2024-25 with a 7-24 overall record and a 3-17 conference mark. This final evaluation by Medcalf underscores both the impressive turnaround by Clemson and the exciting new faces that emerged over the season. Contact us @Clemson_Wire on X, and like our page on Facebook for ongoing coverage of Clemson Tigers news and notes, plus opinions.
USA Today
10-04-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
March Madness: Where Florida basketball national champions rank among others this century
March Madness: Where Florida basketball national champions rank among others this century The Florida Gators took home their third men's basketball title on Monday after rallying back to beat the Houston Cougars in the 2025 NCAA Tournament championship game, making UF the only school to have a trio of titles in both football and basketball. It is a proud time for the Orange and Blue, which had suffered through some lean years in the first half of the 2020s. However, it took only three years for Todd Golden to turn the program around, and now Florida is back on top of the world. With this year's edition of March Madness officially in the books, ESPN's Byron Medcalf went back and ranked the 24 national title-winning teams spanning across every season this century — with the exception of the canceled COVID year. He based his opinions on both regular-season and postseason results. Here is where the Gators ranked among those programs. No. 21: 2025 Florida Gators The recent championship ranks the lowest of the three in ESPN's rankings, but that certainly does not diminish the accomplishment nor does it suck any of the excitement out of the epic run. "The Gators ended the season as one of the hottest teams in the country after losing just one game after Feb. 1, finishing a game behind the NCAA tournament's No. 1 overall seed Auburn in the SEC standings while securing the conference tournament title. They also ranked second in adjusted offensive efficiency and sixth in adjusted defensive efficiency on KenPom," Medcalf explains. "It was Clayton's rise — he scored 23 or more points in four NCAA tournament games — that helped lift the Gators through close calls in multiple games. They had to fight through sizable deficits in multiple games and managed to launch successful comebacks in each, but they were a great story more than an all-time great team." While Clayton was undoubtedly the heart and soul of this team, one should not overlook the team chemistry and how the sum of their efforts was greater than their individual parts. No. 11: 2006 Florida Gators Florida's first title also coincided with the football team's second championship, which had Gainesville going absolutely bonkers during that era. It was the first of two for the Oh Fours and one of the funniest teams to ever play inside the O'Connell Center. "Billy Donovan's two-peat began with a Florida team that won its first 17-0 games and then struggled through a 5-6 stretch. There were mitigating circumstances, though. Lee Humphrey, the starting point guard, had to overcome a shoulder injury and Corey Brewer needed time to recover from mono. On March 1, 2006, however, Noah scored 37 points in a 77-66 win over Georgia that snapped a three-game losing streak," Medcalf notes. "Florida never lost another game. Noah had 30 blocks in the NCAA tournament, as the Gators — whose roster also included Al Horford — ended 2-seed UCLA's 12-game winning streak. Plus, their NCAA tournament opponents averaged only 56.6 PPG." This was a team that experienced some much-needed adversity down the stretch, and ultimately, that losing streak helped sharpen the sword for the Gators' charge through the tournament. No. 5: 2007 Florida Gators When it was announced that the 2007 team would return all of its starters from the year prior, UF was immediately the pick to repeat and carried a target on its back all season. That did not matter as the clout carried over without missing a beat. "Between March 21, 2006 and Feb. 17, 2007, these Gators lost only two games. Their first national title run in 2006 established a new standard for a program that won its second title in a row a year later. How? They thrived on a concept that's almost impossible to achieve in today's game: continuity," Medcalf recalls. "The same starters from the 2006 title game — Lee Humphrey, Taurean Green, Al Horford, Corey Brewer and Noah — also started in the 2007 championship win over an Ohio State squad led by freshman Greg Oden (an AP first-team All-American) and Mike Conley Jr. (18 years in the NBA). These Gators didn't dominate the NCAA tournament, but they were more consistent than the 2006 team and one of the better squads we've witnessed over the past 25 years." An epic finish to an epic run for the Orange and Blue. ESPN's full NCAA Tournament rankings for 2000's 2001 Duke Blue Devils 2009 North Carolina Tar Heels 2012 Kentucky Wildcats 2024 UConn Huskies 2007 Florida Gators 2018 Villanova Wildcats 2004 UConn Huskies 2005 North Carolina Tar Heels 2008 Kansas Jayhawks 2023 UConn Huskies 2006 Florida Gators 2016 Villanova Wildcats 2015 Duke Blue Devils 2000 Michigan State Spartans 2013 Louisville Cardinals 2002 Maryland Terrapins 2003 Syracuse Orange 2010 Duke Blue Devils 2022 Kansas Jayhawks 2021 Baylor Bears 2025 Florida Gators 2019 Virginia Cavaliers 2017 North Carolina Tar Heels 2011 UConn Huskies 2014 UConn Huskies Follow us @GatorsWire on X, formerly known as Twitter, as well as Bluesky, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Florida Gators news, notes and opinions.
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Infidelity for the social media age: What is microcheating, and is it a big deal?
Liking a co-worker's photo on social media. Sending them direct messages. Checking in on Slack more often than before. Progressively interacting in this way with someone outside your relationship may be no big deal to you. To your significant other, however, it may be microcheating, which some people consider a form of infidelity because it can involve building a bond one heart emoji at a time. Although pushing the boundaries of what's allowed in a relationship is not a new concept, the issue has become even more common with the rise of remote work, said William Schroeder, a therapist and owner of Just Mind Counseling centers in Austin, Texas. 'People are having more digital relationships so it kind of creates more space for that,' Schroeder said. 'In this work-from-home environment, it can happen even easier because it's real low risk.' What is microcheating? Microcheating, a term popularized by Australian psychologist Melanie Schilling, could be anything short of a physical or emotional relationship if it involves a behavior you can't talk about openly with a partner. Besides furtive social media chatting, it also could mean lingering too long at the water cooler to talk to a co-worker, sharing personal details of your own relationship, or dressing up if you know you'll see someone. 'We've just put a newer label on it,' said Abby Medcalf, a psychologist in Berkeley, California, and host of the 'Relationships Made Easy' podcast. But Medcalf noted that with most of her patients in recent years, microcheating involves texting or messages on social media. And it can be a slippery slope. What's the big deal? As relationship norms evolve and terms like 'polyamory' come out of the shadows, liking or commenting on a photo may seem fairly innocuous. Many couples don't care, Medcalf said, but people who do shouldn't feel bad for it. 'There isn't a right and wrong in relationships,' she said. 'It comes down to preferences.' Even if a specific action has not been discussed and forbidden, trouble arises when it takes away energy from your primary relationship, she said. 'It's cheating if your partner doesn't like it, or doesn't know about it, or wouldn't like it if they knew about it,' she said. She advised resisting the urge to snoop, which is a sign there is a lack of trust in the relationship. 'All you want to know is, how is your partner treating you?' she said. 'Do you feel No. 1?' How should couples handle it? Schroeder said every relationship has boundaries, some of which may have been discussed and others that are implied. These days, the gray area is bigger than ever. Particularly if a couple met on a dating app, it's important to discuss whether to disable it and be exclusive, he said. Then define what 'exclusive' means, such as not dating other people, continuing conversations through an app or pursuing others on social media. The best time to bring it up is long before a problem arises, even if it's difficult to know when or how, he said. He equated having this talk with driving. 'If you think that you have a full tank of gas, you're not going to start thinking, 'When should we stop to get gas?'' he said. A change in behavior — if your significant other seems to be more secretive with their phone, for instance, or checks social media more often — could a sign of an issue, he said. But try not to be accusatory. Rather, mention you have noticed they are more engaged with their phone and that it worries you because you're not sure what it means. 'Having that kind of curiosity is a much better place to have a conversation,' Schroeder said. He said microcheating happens for many reasons, but often it's because people are simply looking for that spark they feel from a new relationship. Some patients who engage in secretive behavior never cross further lines, but Schroeder said noticing if you yourself are doing it can be instructive. Also, it doesn't necessarily mean the end of a relationship. 'It can be this crisis to rebuild,' he said. 'Sometimes when these little microcheating examples come up, it can be really helpful to understand, 'Alright, why is this coming up for me?'' EDITOR'S NOTE: Albert Stumm writes about wellness, food and travel. Find his work at
