Composer Noël Coward had some choice advice for Marlene Dietrich in 1956 during her rocky love affair with Yul Brynner:
“Do please try to work out for yourself a little personal philosophy and DO NOT, repeat DO NOT be so bloody vulnerable. To hell with God damned “L’Amour.” It always causes far more trouble than it is worth. Don’t run after it. Don’t court it. Keep it waiting off stage until you’re good and ready for it and even then treat it with the suspicious disdain that it deserves…I am sick to death of you waiting about in empty houses and apartments with your ears strained for the telephone to ring. Snap out of it, girl!”
Yeah!
Dietrich would have been 55, and Brynner 36, at the time. He had just spent three victorious years on Broadway in his signature role in The King and I, and she was about to star in the hit film Witness for the Prosecution.
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