Latest news with #Antipodean
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Dua Lipa & Fiance Callum Turner Have ‘Two-And-A-Half Week' Dating Rule
Dua Lipa is finally letting the world in on her romance with now-fiancé, Callum Turner, as she opened up about their relationship in a recent interview. The singer initially sparked dating rumors with the British actor in January 2024. While Lipa has continued to give glimpses of her loved-up moments with Turner, she still kept her relationship dynamics low-key. Now, the singer has finally given some insight into their love story and even revealed that she broke her dating rule. Dua Lipa recently got candid about breaking her dating rule with her fiancé, Callum Turner, during her Antipodean tour. In an interview with British Vogue, the 29-year-old revealed that despite their busy schedules, she and her beau have a 'two-and-a-half week rule.' This means that the lovebirds won't be apart for longer than this duration. However, the rule was broken when she embarked on the Australia and New Zealand leg of her Radical Optimism Tour. Lipa and Turner had to break that dating rule during her Antipodean tour. The couple were apart for three weeks instead and found it 'very hard.' During the interview, Lipa also confirmed her engagement to Turner. The revelation came after months of speculation about the 'Levitating' hitmaker's relationship status. In December last year, Lipa sparked engagement rumors after flaunting a stunning rock on her ring finger as she marked the 'last days of 2024.' While the ring caught everyone's eyes, Lipa never publicly confirmed her engagement to Turner until now. The musician told British Vogue that she is indeed engaged to the 35-year-old British star. Lipa gushed and said that it is 'very exciting.' Meanwhile, the lovebirds have yet to set the date for their wedding. Lipa shared that there are no plans at the moment as she wants to finish her tour, while Turner has also been shooting. Nonetheless, the 'Training Season' crooner added, 'We're just enjoying this period.' Originally reported by Shriya Swami on Reality Tea. The post Dua Lipa & Fiance Callum Turner Have 'Two-And-A-Half Week' Dating Rule appeared first on Mandatory.
New Paper
10-06-2025
- Sport
- New Paper
Eruption ready to explode
Racegoers at Sungai Besi should be in for a treat when the Four-Year-Old Sprint Championship comes up on June 15. Invariably, there will be a bully in the pack, as it has often been the case when such aged series are contested. This year, the big boy in this feature over the 1,200m event appears to be Antipodean. With a rating of 103 and 10 wins from 15 outings - that last one coming on April 5 - Antipodean should start as the logical favourite in the showcase event. But the son of Derryn, who has recorded nine of his wins for Simon Dunderdale and only one for his current trainer, Tiang Kim Choi, might have his work cut out. Emerging from the training track on the morning of June 10, a couple of runners threw down the gauntlet. They could be the ones out to spoil the party for Antipodean. In particular, take note of Eruption and Big Union. Sure, they are both considered "lesser lights" on the big stage but, if allowed to throw in some punches, they both could do damage. Eruption would have gone into the notebooks of many at trackside when he ran the 600m in 37.6sec, while Big Union did not put a hoof wrong when disposing of that same trip in an easy 40.6sec. And, drawing a line through their recent showing in races, both have legitimate chances in that big race for four-year-olds. Eruption boasts a stellar record for the first half of the 2025 season. He won a 1,400m race on Jan 26 and he was again successful over that same trip on April 27. Last time on May 18, when sent away as the raging favourite, the son of Xtravagant found one to beat in Pacific Warrior, who took the honours when winning by half a length. Eruption has since trained on and, while the 1,200m might seem a tad short, his style of racing of staying close to the lead should see him involved in the finish. Yes, Antipodean does seem like he is the one to beat. But, should the Lawson Moy-trained Eruption explode over the final furlong, we might just see fireworks. As for Big Union, he is a huge chance in the contest coming up. Indeed and right now, he must seem like gold dust to his trainer Jerome Tan and the Cat Racing Stable. Big Union has been off the board just four times in his 16 outings at Kranji and now at the Selangor Turf Club. Sure, he has yet to knock home a win in all of his six starts in Malaysia - but he has not been left stranded in any of those races. Last time - on June 1 - and in a "high class" event, he went down fighting to Pacific Victory. A run earlier, on May 18, he ran fourth to the very exciting Pacific Vampire in a Supreme race over the 1,100m. The son of Zoustar will enjoy the short and sharp 1,200m he has to cover on June 15, as three of his five career wins at Kranji were over this same trip. He will give his rivals in the big sprint something to think about. So, keep him in your calculations. Outside of that feature event, two runners entered for the Class 4 sprint over the 1,100m were also put through their paces on the training track. They were War Dragon and Cheerful Baby. War Dragon clocked a flashy 37.6sec for the 600m while Cheerful Baby went over that same trip in 38.2sec. Forget the fact that War Dragon is a 10-year-old going on 11. The son of Battle Paint still believes he is one of the young crowd and, when in the mood, he can still raise a pretty neat gallop. We saw it three starts back on Feb 23 when he ran a half-length second to Legend Ninety Two. It has been a long while since War Dragon, who is also prepared by Moy, last won a race but, on the strength of his work, he might be a good one to toss into those novelty bets. As for Cheerful Baby, another Tan ward, he has been sparingly raced and the assignment coming up will be his second in 2025. However, he has been to three trials and his last one on June 4 saw him finish third behind the winner Kim Legend. His claim to fame must be the time he put together four wins in a row when racing at Kranji. The son of Brazen Beau is not going to do that any time soon but, given his work on the training track, he could, in his next few runs, be capable of bringing home his first Malaysian pay cheque. brian@
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Review: Nicolas Cage Goes Full 'Groundhog Day' Thriller in 'The Surfer'
A surprisingly low-key Nicolas Cage performance anchors The Surfer, a throwback revenge thriller with a jet-black comedic edge from Vivarium director Lorcan Finnegan. For about 40 minutes, this film is an intriguing and even propulsive B-movie programmer. The first act is an efficient revenge setup, infused with some lush photography (the picture was shot on location in Melbourne) and an authentic grittiness which recalls '70s Antipodean grindhouse classics. But unfortunately, like all exploitation riffs which make the mistake of taking themselves too seriously, The Surfer goes on far too long and eventually exhausts its audience. Cage plays the titlular character, an unnamed office drone who whisks his son (Finn Little) to an idyllic coastal spot in the community where he was raised. The Surfer wants to buy a home overlooking the beach, the very same one in which he lived until age 15, when his father died and his mother moved the family to California. Hoping to take his son out to catch a few waves and an enviable glimpse of their new abode, he's instead met with some hostile 'localism' from the beach's resident muscle heads who are engaged in a bizarre salt-water cult overseen by Scally (Julian McMahon). At this point, The Surfer takes a detour into the sort of nightmare comedy about which you can ask no questions. Why, after being violently rebuffed and humiliated in front of his son, does Cage begin living on the beach in his car? Why does he keep returning to receive fresh injuries from the cult members? Why not just grab an Airbnb near his new home? What's up with the old man, also living out of his car, who's passing around flyers advertising his missing son? And why, after stealing his surfboard, do the cult members claim they've had it for seven years? There's a lot going on in The Surfer — the broken relationships of fathers and sons; the seeping wounds of male ego; mid-life malaise; the unexplained possibility of time loops — but none of it develops into anything. It's long been the safe haven of marginally talented filmmakers to produce a hallucinatory, vaguely existential film of dubious quality and pass it off as the vision of an auteur; but when the quality isn't there, it's all terribly transparent. Instead of interrogating or developing any of the ideas to which the film gestures, Finnegan visits a succession of increasingly outlandish humiliations onto his title character, all of which seem tailor-made for Cage's particular acting style. Watch him drink dirty water from a puddle (and later a public toilet)! Wince as he jumps onto broken glass! Shudder when he pawns his late father's watch for a flat white!The screenplay, by Thomas Martin, doubtless sent its cast and crew into fits of giggles. None of that mirth translates to the screen. By the time Cage swings a live rat by the tail (which he later beats to death and pockets for a snack) and attempts to shoot a dog in the head, you'll likely wish the whole thing would end so you can go home. Sequences which seem designed to provoke a strong emotional reaction pass without impression, boring instead of outraging. The climax is so foregone and uninspiring that your mind may wander to your shopping list in the film's final moments. It's worth mentioning that there's an admirable nastiness to this movie, and one gets the sense that Finnegan would do nicely with a straight, no-frills suspense piece. There's a queasy quality to the beach bullies that wouldn't be out of place in a home invasion movie, and before it goes off the rails, the film chugs along with a nicely suspenseful rhythm. There are even fleeting moments where you see in Finnegan's approach something of the efficient, genre-literate subversion Steven Soderbergh accomplishes so effortlessly. But what's the point of it all? Considering most of its business will presumably be done on streaming, it's odd that The Surfer so frequently tempts its audience to tune out. Unfortunately, the temptation stems not from the visceral impact of the travesties visited upon Cage (none of which truly land) but rather from the intense feeling of déjà vu. For all of its excesses, we've seen this done many times before and frequently better. The Surfer is currently in cinemas.
The Age
06-06-2025
- 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
06-06-2025
- 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.'
