Two Old Pros

At 41, Judy Garland may have gone over the rainbow for the last time.

She arrived in Australia patting her stomach to show how thin she was and vowing that her drinking days were over. Sydney loved her. Then on to Melbourne and a sellout audience of 7,000 for a one-night stand at Festival Hall. They waited exactly an hour and seven minutes past curtain time for her to appear, and this was one time Judy was not worth waiting for.

Allergy in Melbourne. She stumbled onstage in her street clothes and went straight into her opening number, When You're Smiling. Strutting around and mugging, she invited her audience to "Let's all sing together!" but they wouldn't have any of that. "I just couldn't get out of that hotel," she said, and a voice yelled, "Have another brandy!" She didn't need one.

She got the conductor's baton away from him and began trying to conduct the 30-piece orchestra; she draped the cord of her microphone around the head of one of the violinists; she sat on a chair and seemed to be muttering to herself. She slurred through some of her songs at random. "I'm supposed to be temperamental," she explained.

The audience began to leave long before she did, but she finally stalked off, leaving the orchestra to play her signature, Over the Rainbow, again and again in a vain attempt to get her back. The next day Judy's manager explained that she was suffering from an allergy that made it necessary for her to spray her throat continually, and she was whisked into an airplane for Sydney so fast that her feet barely touched the ground. There was time, though, to kiss one reporter on the mouth and answer another's question about whether she thought she would retire. "I think so," said Judy. "I would like to do a play. I would like to do a comedy."

Affinity in Moscow. Things were different in Moscow, where an even older pro wowed her sellout audience of 1,350 in a variety theater across the river from the Kremlin. Marlene Dietrich, who left her native Germany in 1930 and refused to go back after Hitler came to power, was hailed by the Russian press as a "fighter against Fascism," but she did her best to dodge politics--and it wasn't hard in a tight, transparent pink evening dress.

She delivered the old Dietrich standbys in the old throaty stage whisper that makes every man feel as though Marlene's face were buried in his neck. Even if she is now 62, the audience loved the feeling. When it was over, she made it mutual. "I must tell you that I have loved you for a long time," she told them. "The reason I love you is because you have no lukewarm emotions--you are either very sad or very happy. I am proud to say I think I have a Russian soul myself." The curtain calls lasted for 15 minutes.

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