Marlene Dietrich and Konstantin Paustovsky.
This moment occurred after a concert she gave in Moscow, 1964. She had been blabbing to the press about the revered (and sometimes suppressed) author Konstantin Paustovsky from the moment she arrived in Russia, declaring if she were on a desert island and could only bring one book, it would be Paustovsky’s memoir The Story of a Life. The author must have gotten wind of her comments in the press. He was very ill at the time (and would die a couple years later). So he came out to see her perform. Dietrich wrote in her memoir of her nerves, of how she felt her performance was bad that night. She was trying too hard to impress him. The ultra-cool woman trembled. Afterwards, unexpectedly, in a moment unplanned, surprising her, Paustovsky came up onstage – with much struggle, he was so weak – and when she saw him, she dropped to her knees before him.
