‘A terrible tragedy': The night in Sydney that changed Marlene Dietrich's life

Sydney Morning Herald

06-06-2025

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.)
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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.'